


line of sight

by fullborn



Category: Godless (TV 2017)
Genre: Earned Intimacy, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-Canon, Western, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:41:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27302104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fullborn/pseuds/fullborn
Summary: Roy returns to La Belle. Bill walks the line. Alice decides exactly what she wants.
Relationships: Alice Fletcher/Roy Goode/Bill McNue
Comments: 10
Kudos: 19
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	line of sight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blurhawaii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blurhawaii/gifts).



> A Yuletide treat for [blurhawaii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blurhawaii/pseuds/blurhawaii). This appeared fully formed in my head after reading your Yuletide letter, so I had to get it out somehow. Hope you enjoy :)

It only occurred to her now to be lonely. Two husbands gone, years without a man at her side playing out over half the length of her son’s lifetime, and the expanse of sky beyond the fence line had never hemmed her in so fiercely as it did now. She dug and tilled a small vegetable patch. She drew water hand-over-hand from the well and watched shoots break through the arid soil as the days stretched into months. She watched the horizon for the telltale dust-trail that heralded the arrival of a horseman, but the horizon remained empty and the man she told herself she was not waiting for never reappeared. 

‘It’s the wrong ocean,’ Truckee had said, as she packed their belongings into boxes and made arrangements for their removal to Boston.

‘Water’s water no matter where. Suppose we go see what the fuss is about.’ 

Iyovi watched and smoked tobacco, but never said a word. The old woman was waiting too: for Alice to lose her nerve and unpack the boxes as she had so many times before, to regain her sense and realise there was nothing for her half-Paiute son in the northern, civilised world of cold brick and steel. But this time it was different. The town had been rebuilt but it was a different town, and there was nothing familiar in it apart from Bill and his deferent visits, where he worked alongside her in the pasture or the barn but never stayed long enough for her to miss him when he was gone. 

She knew he loved her because he was letting her leave. It was the same for him as it had been for her with Roy, and she respected him the more for it even if it pained her to see the grimly restrained set of his jaw whenever he spoke to her, as if he were forcing her into the role of a stranger for his own wellbeing. Roy would always be the silent man between them. 

She supposed things would have gone on like this, if not for the arrival of the horseman in the middle of the night one week from their planned departure. 

‘Make yourself known,’ she had said, the shotgun familiar against her shoulder. Thinking the stranger too travel-worn for Bill as she cocked the gun and squinted into the dark and shivered at the chill night air under her nightgown, mind on the real figure of the man in front of her instead of the hoped-for man of her memory. ‘I’m goin to count down from three, if you want to turn yourself around. One…’

She heard him murmur her name, right as she hit three. It was the only thing that could have made her miss as she did: the gun cracked loud against her ear as the bullet went wide and buried itself in the fencepost to his left, but she knew what she had heard. Roy’s voice in the dark. Just as it was in her dreams. 

***

‘Did you get to California?’ Truckee asked over breakfast, upon finding Roy sitting at the table alongside his mother and grandmother as if he had never left. Alice tried to see her son through Roy’s eyes: taller, perhaps, hair longer, but still filled with a boy’s impatience and desire to seem fully grown-up.

‘That I did,’ Roy replied, worn and lean with long weeks on the road. ‘All the way to Atascadero.’

Alice handed him the breadknife. He cut two slices and handed one to her while Truckee formulated his next set of questions. 

‘Did you find your brother?’

‘After a while. Took a fair bit of asking around til someone recognised the name. He and his wife got a place on the seafront, right like he said he did. They’re good folk.’

‘What was it like?’

‘Seeing my kin?’

‘No. The ocean.’

‘Biggest thing I ever seen. Beautiful. Hard to figure sometimes where the water ends and the sky begins, it bein so blue and pale,’ Roy said. ‘Here, I brought you something.’

He reached into his battered canvas coat and pulled out a shell. It sat nestled in the palm of his hand, horned as a lizard and conical at one end, ringed in dusty stripes like a canyon wall. Truckee took it with caution, ran his fingers over the ridges and point of it. There was an opening on the bottom.

‘Put that to your ear,’ said Roy, ‘and you can hear the ocean. Try it.’

‘That ain’t true, is it?’

‘Well, go ahead and give it a go. You think I’d lie to you?’

Truckee brought the shell to his ear and furrowed his brow, listening hard. His face cracked into a disbelieving grin. ‘It’s like he said,’ he exclaimed. Iyovi took the shell from him and listened for a long minute before passing it to Alice. She held the opening to her ear. Roy watched her, and she watched him as the pulsing sound of waves on a beach filled her head and left her hungry for a place she had never been. It was different to the sound of the flood. Measured and soothing. Roy had made it to the water and it had not taken his life as it had her first husband; he was here, before her, smiling into his scrubby beard .

He gave her a handful of sea-glass after supper, when they were alone and huddled on the porch watching the night brighten with stars. Five pieces: three white, one green, and one pale blue. Alice held them to the light and felt their grainy translucence in her palm. The edges gone smooth where there once had been nothing but sharpness, where her fingers should have caught and bled. 

She made a charm out of the glass and strung it up by the front door. The glass swayed and glimmered in the plains wind, the prettiest thing around for miles, and she knew then that putting it there meant that the house was marked and that there was no leaving while it was in place. It meant that she aimed to stay. 

***

Bill rode up later in the week, right when Alice said he would. Roy was in the yard, hammering together a chicken coop out of wire and old fence-posts. He wiped his brow and watched Bill draw his horse to a halt. The silver badge was still pinned under his jacket and the gun still hung from his belt. He looked at Roy like the sight of him in Alice’s yard was neither expected nor wholly unwelcome, but nonetheless seen, which Roy was glad to note; six months til he went blind, Bill had said, but here he was all that time later seemingly no worse than he had been at their first meeting. 

‘Mr. Ward,’ said Bill dryly. ‘Is that you?’ 

‘Sheriff.’ Roy slipped the hammer into his belt and straightened his shirt. ‘It’s good to see you, sir.’

‘Wish I could say likewise, if it didn’t have me doubting the veracity of my own memory. Could’ve sworn you struck out for California. Or did that not take?’

‘Took me back here, is all. There were some things I left behind.’ 

‘Dead men got a manner of coming back around here, or so I’ve heard tell,’ Bill said. He didn’t seem inclined to dismount, just kept glancing beyond Roy at the empty porch as if he could make Alice appear by doing so. ‘Save for Injuns and their dogs, I’d count you the first.’

The whole long journey back from California Roy had gotten used to days of seeing no people at all, and it had put him out of the habit of making small-talk. It was okay to just stand there and take things in. Bill seemed grateful for the lull in conversation, kept his hands laced in the reigns and his eyes on the horizon. There was a burr caught in this horse’s mane. Roy busied himself on easing it free without tangling it any further, and when he was finished he glanced up and found Bill looking down at him with a flat consideration made inscrutable by the dark line of his moustache and the brimmed shadow of his hat. 

They were both relieved when Alice came out onto the porch. 

‘Bill, come up to the house,’ she called, and Bill dismounted and followed her inside without a word. They remained there some time. Roy watered Bill’s horse and talked gently to her all the while, keeping his mind from whatever conversation was going on between the two of them indoors. He had no right intruding, after all. Had intruded the first time and here he was at it again, throwing himself between Alice and a better life, and if she wanted to move to Boston or take a man other than him then it was her prerogative to do so and he would not stop her. 

At least Bill’s horse was well cared-for. He was a good man. 

Roy stood and watched the red-breasted finches flit between the fence-posts and eaves. When Bill emerged from the house he already had his coat on and hat jammed onto his head, and was halfway to his horse when Alice joined them with a pair of kitchen scissors tucked into her belt.

‘I was just about to trim Roy’s hair some,’ Alice said. ‘If you want to stay, I got the time.’

Bill pushed the hat back on his head and ran a hand through his hair. The way he kept it, close-cropped at the sides and short all over, made Roy wonder if he cut it himself or if he let someone else do it for him; his sister, maybe, if she ever found herself in a patient and familial mood. But that wasn’t right. Surely the only woman Bill would let touch him like that was Alice. 

‘It that bad, huh?’

‘Just an offer. If it were that bad I’d have been more pointed about it.’ 

‘In that case I best be off. Maggie’s got the kids. They’re expecting me,’ Bill said, which didn’t come across as a lie, exactly, but Roy was willing to bet it wasn’t the whole truth neither. 

He was surprised when Bill stuck out his hand for him to shake as he made his leave. ‘You take care, Mr. Ward,’ Bill said, then murmured, as if it were an aside, ‘One week more and you’d have been too late,’ which Roy knew was as close as he could get to saying thank-you for doing what he had not been able to do, even if it stung his pride to say so.

Roy went to stand by Alice and watched him ride away. Her fingers found his.

Later, she tossed the handfuls of shorn hair into the yard for the wind to gather, hoping the finches would use its softness to line their nests. There were different ways of making a home, she said. 

***

Bill stayed away, as best he could. The new jail was made from brick and iron and still unfamiliar, and it was no good sitting at his desk waiting for some trouble to kick up in the saloon. It was no good, so he rode. 

He rode the territory til the place looked like home and the sick fatal feeling of seeing Roy Goode standing in Alice’s yard ebbed to a dull ache, and he no longer wanted to drink himself to sleep at night. William and Trudy were happy to have him around at home. It was better this way. If Maggie noticed the dark tilt to his look or his sudden disinclination to visit to the widow Fletcher’s, she said nothing of it. Alice was staying, was the word around town. Had taken another turn of heart and sent the wagoner and team of movers back to town unworked and with full pay, and no reason why, and Bill was a man known for his dislike of rumour and gossip in general so no one thought to ask his mind on the matter, whether he would have shared it or not. 

He thought of Roy up at the house, making himself useful in the ways Bill wished he could be useful. He had never seen Alice take to someone as quickly as she had taken to Roy after she had shot and patched him back up. Still, it wasn’t his place to interfere in her happiness, even if it was something in which he had no part. He was not a jealous man. 

Or so he told himself. 

He might have stayed away for good were it not for Truckee, who rode into town one afternoon and hitched his horse outside the sheriff's office and strode in with a stony-faced purpose that would have had Bill reaching for his gun had the boy been full-grown and fully armed. 

'Why don't you come round no more?' was the first thing out of the kid's mouth, accusatory. Always one to speak his mind. 'You sick?'

Bill frowned. 'Normally it's custom for a man to give a greeting 'stead of barging into a place, even if the man ain’t half a man yet. What’re you doing here, son?'

'Looking for you, of course. You don't get to treat my mother like you're treating her. It ain't right.'

'What're you talking about?'

Truckee glowered down at him, hands balled into fists. Bill didn't know what in the hell the kid was accusing him of, but he looked dead serious about it. 

'You got to stop makin her sad,' Truckee said. 'You're making her sad and you got to stop. Why don't you come over anymore?'

'I've got work to do.'

Truckee looked disdainfully around at the empty cells. 'That what you told my mother? You're too busy to come see her?' 

'She's got plenty of company.'

'Well, she misses you.' The kid said it factual, hard as any punch he could have thrown. It galled him, getting chewed out by a boy barely on the edge of manhood, but Bill felt a hot flood of shame seeing he had let it come to this in the first place. He massaged his temples.

'Look. Truckee. It ain't like I don't like seeing you all, it's just — your mother deserves some space. She said it was for the best. If she wants to see me she knows where to find me.'

'People say things they don’t mean all the time,' Truckee said slowly. 'Ma kept sayin we’re going to Boston. Roy said I’d never see him again. But we're still here, and so's Roy.'

'It's not that —‘

'She's happy Roy's back and so am I, but she's sad too cause you don't come over anymore. It's like two things at once. But she oughta be just happy.' 

Bill sat there with his hand over his eyes and wished Truckee would have the decency to leave him be, or at least sit down, but Truckee did neither and eventually Bill straightened up and shrugged on his coat. 

‘You ought to get back 'fore your mother starts to worry,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

And Truckee grinned as Bill saddled his horse and rode alongside him all the way home, where Iyovi was standing at the furthest pasture as if waiting for them to arrive. She didn't even let him finish hitching his horse before she tugged on his arm and led him inside, where Alice was serving up bowls of fresh stew, placing a fifth bowl down beside Roy as if she had known he was coming the whole time.

***

A letter arrived a few weeks later. 

Bill found Alice scattering feed across the yard while her new posse of chickens pecked and clucked around her feet. The birds scattered as he dismounted from his horse.

'Addressed to Ms. Alice Fletcher, care of Sheriff McNue,' he said by way of greeting, holding out the letter for her to take. 'Got put on the wrong stage in Flagstaff. Postmark's four months past.'

Alice didn't move to take the letter, just stared down at the shaky script that had written both their names and given the rest over to chance. 

'You open it,' she said at last. Her long brown hair fluttered across her face but she stayed stock still, her eyes still on the envelope. 

'I don't know if I ought to, ma'am. It's addressed to you.'

'Just open the damn letter, Bill.'

He reached into the inner pocket of his overcoat and pulled out the steel-rimmed spectacles he had purchased by postal order from a gentleman in Amarillo. The spectacles were a better fit than his first pair and made his eyes ache less, but it still injured his pride wearing them in front of Alice. He could feel her eyes on him whenever he did. 

'Well,' Bill said. He used his pocket knife to open the letter and squinted down at the uncertain handwriting. 'It ain't all that long.'

'Read it for me, would you?'

Bill awkwardly cleared his throat and read: 

_'Dear Alice,_

_I can hear the ocean from here, as I am writing to you from my brother's kitchen table in Atascadero, California. My brother is a preacher. If you once knew Jim like I did you would know how much a surprise that is, but it suits him, as does his wife, Mary. His boy — my nephew — is about the same age as Truckee is now. They have welcomed me with open arms. It has been good getting to know my brother as a man, but I feel like a spare part here. They are already content. And I find the distance between me and you sometimes unbearable._

_Frank used to tell me that the kin you chose was just as strong as the kin you was born into, and I think that's partways true. I have decided to return to La Belle, if only to see you one more time. I hope you all are doing well._

_I have entrusted this to the care of Sheriff McNue as I do not know if you will still be there when I return but I figure he will make sure you get it one way or another. Tell Truckee that he better have given that black horse a name by now. I hope that fence-post got fixed all right._

_Yours, Roy.'_

Alice took the letter from him when he finished and ran a hand over the page, then looked at him. 'His spelling's gotten better.' 

'Think William could do better by the time he was six.'

‘It strange I'm glad it didn't make it in time? I don't think I could have lived with the hope of it.'

'Well,' Bill said stiffly. 'Sometimes you got to live with it than without it.' A pause stretched out between them and he said, just to say something, 'I best be off, then.'

He mounted his horse and turned homewards, but Alice stepped forward and placed her hand on the horse's neck. 'Thank you for coming,' she murmured. God help him, but her eyes were dark and deep as springwater under a mountain's cold shadow, and he felt himself swallow reflexively. Her hand was now on his knee. 'It's always good to see you, Bill. Don't be a stranger.'

He nodded once, unable to trust his own voice, then she stepped back and her hand slipped from his leg and he spurred his horse onto the trail with the heat of it still seeping into his skin. 'Jesus Christ,' he rasped aloud, then said it again. 'Get a hold of yourself, Bill.' 

For all he knew Roy Goode had been watching them from inside the house. He felt balanced on the edge of something. It made him coax his horse to ride faster and faster the whole long way home, as the sun bloomed across the horizon and cold night came on. 

***

They slipped easily into an old routine, and eventually found a new one. Alice liked to run her hands over the scars that lay on Roy’s body: the place where the shot had pieced his shoulder, the faint line where her bullet had grazed his neck. He was careful with her. As careful and deliberate as he was with the horses, as if she might spook even now with his head on her chest and her hand moving beneath them, her body filled with the same hunger he was. She let him kiss the ugly scar that lay between her breasts. The memory was obscured by different pains now; she didn’t mind that he touched the mark with a care bordering on reverence, or that he never asked her about it. 

‘Bill killed the man that gave me that,’ she told him once, and he had groaned against her with his eyes screwed tightly shut while she held onto him until he was still and spent. 

His reaction interested her. She ran a hand through his hair, remembering the dark look that had filled Bill’s face as he fired his gun again and again, how the blood had tasted hot in her mouth and in her throat as she brought the knife down and the men lay dying around her. A fresh reminder that she was not yet dead. 

***

He had his bad days and his good days, Roy knew, and it looked to be one of the bad ones. They were sitting in Alice’s kitchen. Roy was shelling peas with Iyovi and Trudy while Bill glowered at the paper through his spectacles and made a face at the small print. 

‘I can read to you, you like,’ Roy offered. 

‘Being half-blind’s bad enough,’ grunted Bill. He tossed the newspaper onto the table and raised his eyebrows. ‘I’d prefer to maintain my sense of hearing if it’s all the same to you. Anyone listening to you’s liable to tear their ears off rather’n deal with the frustration of how mind-numbingly slow you read.’ 

Roy kept his smile to himself. ‘Sure Truckee would be happy to help out.’

‘Leave them kids to it. Scarce enough to get half an hour of peace, without dragging them indoors when they don’t need to be.’ Truckee and William were out in the barn, no doubt trying to prove they each knew more about plains-living and gunshooting than the other and making fools of themselves in the process. It was good to see Truckee spend time with a boy his own age. Roy figured there was as much to learn by playing in a barn than anything he could teach him about hunting or clearing his holster. 

‘How’re things in the town?’

‘They look at me different. Think I preferred being a coward than a cripple,’ Bill said. ‘Sides from that it’s just fine. Schoolhouse is just about finished. New preacher keeps insisting on blessing each and every building as it’s opened, not that them ladies mind — ‘cept Maggie of course. He tried it on Callie’s place and Maggie near ripped his head off, told him if she wanted to be on sanctified ground she’d try sleeping in the graveyard.’ 

‘Sounds like you got your hands full.’

‘Sure you ain’t interested in being deputised? Got no one old or gun-smart enough to fill the post.’ Roy knew the death of Bill’s kid deputy had hit him hard, but his answer was the same now as it had been back then. He felt a swell of guilt nonetheless. 

‘Sorry. My gunslinger days are behind me.’

‘Suppose that’s for the best. Though if you take to robbing trains again, you know I’m going to have to track you down.’

‘Well, I appreciate the warning.’ 

Bill almost cracked a rare smile as he got to his feet. ‘Best get some water on the go,’ he said, making for the door, but paused halfway there. 

Nothing amiss as far as Roy could tell. Still, Bill stood for a long few seconds looking at the floor, then shook himself and left. Roy wondered if his failing eyesight was making him see things that weren’t there. There had only been nothing else there save the patch of dark where Bill’s own shadow fell across Roy’s and cast one tall man-shaped figure out across the wooden planks at their feet. 

***

A man was killed during ruckus at the labourers’ camp. Bill had gone out riding after the brothers that did it and had yet to come back: that was as much of the story as Alice could tell two days later, her stomach sick with worry. Maggie and Roy went out on their trail. The dread was strong in her but she kept it at bay by sitting out on the porch with a lantern on one side and her shotgun at the other, willing them all to come home in one piece. 

When they brought Bill back he was barely conscious and had blood drying black all over his face. ‘Must’ve snuck up on him in the dark,’ spat Maggie, murder in her eyes. ‘Found him hogtied in his own blood few miles off the trailhead. Fuckers are gonna pay.’ They left Bill with her, then headed back out into the lengthening dark, Roy giving her one serious flat look that stayed with her long after he was gone.

She cleaned the head-wound best she could. Iyovi made a poultice and plastered it down over Bill’s scalp, where his hair was matted and clogged with new blood. He slept fitfully. When he woke he called her Anna, which scared her, and his eyes would not focus on her face. She had held her second husband as he bled out in the road and had felt the life leave his body; fear told her that she would do the same to Bill in the long hours as she gripped his hand and told him she would never forgive him if he died.

One of the brothers was gutshot when they brought them into town. Whether Maggie or Roy fired the gun, Alice never knew. Roy was distant and inward as he led Bill’s horse to her yard and set about grooming the animal’s muddy coat until it shone.

‘He’s not going to die,’ Iyovi told her, calmly, the third day after they found Bill as her hope began to slip. ‘He knows you would not permit it. Will you allow him to leave this way?’

Alice clenched her hands til her fingernails found blood.

‘No.’

‘Well, then.’ 

And as with many strange and unknowable things, the old woman was right. 

***

Bill woke figuring he must be dead. His head felt like it had been split clean in two by an axe, or trepanned at the very least, but when he drew his fingers through his hair he only found a patch of clean gauze and a raised lump beneath it. To make things stranger, he was in Alice’s bed. Maybe he really had died and this was some kind of test. The last thing he remembered was bedding down for the night knowing he was close on the Neiman Brothers’ trail: a branch cracking deep in the wood, his hand on his gun, then nothing at all. 

He got unsteadily to his feet. Someone had removed his bloody clothes. The edges of his vision were dark as the corners of a burnt ferrotype, and swam with odd spots of colour. It was better to go blind here than at home in his own bed, with his children sleeping in the next room over. He often feared that he would wake up one day and be unable to see them. 

‘Alice?’ he rasped. He fumbled with the door and found Truckee sitting slumped over the table, asleep. The fire burned low in the grate. He got himself some water from the bucket and sat himself down next to Truckee, and that was where Alice found him when she came in from the darkened yard. 

‘I’ll run you a bath,’ she said, smoothing the relief from her face with practiced ease. ‘Are you hungry?’ 

He shook his head. 

‘Alright. You wait here.’

She drew water from the well and heated it, bucket by bucket, over the fire until she had enough to fill the old wooden washtub while he drifted and half-slept. He thought he had enough strength to get up on his own, but grabbed for her shoulder as his vision whited out, only able to feel the cold skin of her collarbone and his own pulsing head. 

‘You’re doing fine,’ said Alice. ‘That’s it. Roy, you mind helping get him to the tub?’

Another set of hands settled under his elbow.Roy smelled like horsehair and horse-sweat, close as they both half-dragged him across the room. He fumbled out of his underclothes. The water was warm but not scalding when he stepped into it, but it still burned on his wrists where his attempts to free himself had abraded the skin raw.

‘Fuck,’ he hissed. Someone started gently scrubbing his neck and back. He cracked open his eyes and watched the water around his legs turn brackish and pink with dissolving blood and dirt. ‘You find those boys?’

‘It’s been taken care of,’ Alice murmured. It wasn’t right, having her here with him buck-naked and wet as a drowned dog, but for some reason it didn’t bother him none. She calmly began to soap his hair. Careful with the head wound, her fingers deliberate and painless on his scalp. When he was clean they helped him out onto the floor and let him go about slowly towelling himself dry while he willed himself not to get sick. 

‘Water’s still warm,’ said Roy. ‘Think I’ll get a second use of it, if that’s alright. No point letting it go to waste.’ 

A white flash of skin out of the corner of his eye, Roy unselfconsciously shucking his clothes and getting into the tub without ceremony or complaint. Dunking his head under and scrubbing at his flanks. Alice sat on a stool in the corner and waited until Bill felt able, then helped him to his feet and led him back to her bedroom. 

‘Don’t want to put you out none,’ he said, lying there drained of any strength he had left. ‘It’s your bed.’

‘If I wanted you out in the barn, you’d be out in the barn. It’s no trouble.’

‘You don’t owe me. You know.’ Bill tried to sit up but she pushed him gently back onto the pillow, face blank and unreadable. ‘It’s never been like that.’

It was important to him that she knew that of all the things he had done for her over the years, he had never expected a lick in return. Just one more excuse to ride up to her door. That was it. 

‘Try to get some rest, Bill,’ was all she said. ‘We’ll see you in the morning.’

She pulled the door shut behind her and went off to find Roy, doubtless to sleep by his side while Bill lay stranded and alone in her bed. He stewed in the dark. The outline of his old coat hung from the back of Alice’s door like an imagined landmark from another age, and he held onto the sight of it as he slipped into deep sleep as if it was the last thing he would ever see. 

***

Bill rested up til he was well enough to ride back to town. 

‘Give my best to Mary-Agnes,’ Alice said as he stood at the door, hat in hand, feeling like he always did when it was time for him to leave. ‘I trust she’ll handle things til that wound of yours closes over, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ muttered Bill, and he might have said more had she not leaned up and placed a kiss on his stubbled cheek. He froze. Alice breezed on past him out the door, to where his horse was tethered and waiting. Bill stood there for a moment bracing himself for some kind of challenge but Roy was still bent over his oatmeal, as if nothing had happened. He only lifted his head as Bill moved toward the door and the look he gave him was without anything in it, just the tail-end glance of a man preoccupied with his breakfast and his head half in a dream. 

As if he didn’t mind at all. 

***

It wasn’t often that Roy rode into La Belle since he had been declared officially dead. He took the ridge-trail, out along the edges of what remained of Blacktown and its low-built farmsteads. More folk had survived there than they first thought, enough to make at least a full dozen and hardy as the shoots growing up from the cracked earth of Alice’s garden. A few men stood in a field with hoes propped against their sides. Roy nodded in silent greeting and kept riding until he came to Bill’s small house on the edge of town. 

Trudy was outside making shapes in the dirt with a stick. 

‘Your daddy home, miss?’ he asked. She considered him for a while, then mutely pointed inside the shack. 

He handed her a nickel and knocked before entering. Bill was sitting at the kitchen table with Callie Dunne, a chess board set out between them. Maggie sat in the corner cleaning her gun. The boy, William, watched with interest as Callie plucked Bill’s knight from the board.

‘Looks like you’re losing,’ Roy said mildly. ‘That king looks pretty lonely.’

Callie smirked up at him from the stack of white pieces gathered at her side of the table. ‘I’m showing William here the best way to win nine times out of ten. Sheriff McNue's being very accommodating.’ 

Bill glanced upwards, half-frowning, ‘You here to watch me lose or what?’ 

‘Was going to ask you to come for a ride, actually, if Ms. Dunne and your sister don’t mind none.’

‘Think that’d be a mercy.’ He turned to Maggie. ‘You okay with the kids til I get back?’

‘As always, dear brother. Get your ass gone.’

They rode north til they came to the low grassy valley where Roy had shot Frank Griffin dead. The trees were starting to bud, green among the dry bark and grass. ‘Thought you weren’t carrying a gun no more,’ said Bill, his eyes on the shotgun strapped to Roy’s side. 

‘I ain’t. It’s for you.’ 

Roy dismounted and set about marking the trees with red paint, daubing it about man-high and moving to the next. 

‘It’s harder for you in the dark, right?’ asked Roy when he was done. He packed the paint tin and brush back into his pack and turned to Bill. 

‘What? Seeing? Think it’s the same for everyone in that regard.’ 

‘You know what I mean. What if you need to shoot someone?’

‘I stand there and get shot.’

‘You were aiming just fine last I saw you with a gun.’ 

Bill tugged at his moustache and frowned at his boots. ‘Can’t explain that.’ 

‘Alice had an idea, see.’ Roy tugged the watch chain from Bill’s vest and held out the timepiece in his palm, patient as he explained: ‘Say you can’t see nothing. You can still shoot, long as you know where you’re shooting at: three o’clock to the right, twelve o’clock straight ahead, nine o’clock to the left, you get me?’

‘Yeah, but I don’t see what that’s got to do with —’

‘All you need is someone to be your eyes. I’m right here. Ain’t nothing different to the last time, right? Hell, it’s easier.’

Roy tugged a strip of cloth from his pocket and held it out to Bill along with the gun. For a moment he thought Bill was going to knock the blindfold from his hand, or laugh, but he just took it from him with a raised eyebrow and a mouth full of doubt. 

‘You fuckin’ serious?’ 

‘Yessir. As a bullet.’

*** 

Bill never felt as stupid as he did with his eyes covered and a gun in his hand, listening on tenterhooks for Roy’s next command. The stock was warm against his cheek. A faint haze filtered through the strip of linen over his eyes and turned the world darkly orange-lit, but he was as good as blind. Didn’t even know which way he was facing. 

‘10 o’clock,’ Roy said, and Bill pivoted on his heels and fired. He was pretty sure he was missing every damn shot, but Roy kept him at it with the relentless patience of schoolteacher. He was getting better at keeping track of his rounds and reloading the gun without dropping the shells at any rate, though what good that was if he couldn’t hit the broadside of a tree at twenty paces he didn’t know. 

‘Try aiming lower than you ordinarily might,’ came Roy’s beside him, then the feel of his hand on Bill’s upper arm. Bill let him adjust his stance, though it gave him a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach to be so close to the man and not see his face. His neck itched. ‘Want to keep it centre-mass or lower, part that’s more of a target. Let’s go again.’

Bill tried to imagine the clock-face at his feet as he readied himself. 

The next shot went wide, and the next. He felt his frustration build as the morning slipped on and the trees remained free of bullet holes. ‘This is a fool’s errand,’ he grunted. ‘Hear me? Waste of damn time.’

‘One o’clock.’ 

He reacted unthinkingly, the gunshot echoing in his ears before he could fully realise that it had been Alice’s voice that gave the order. There was a dull crack as the shot hit bark. How long had she been standing there watching? 

‘Now _that’s_ how it’s done,’ Roy whooped, the grin clear in his voice. ‘How about that. Nine o’clock.’

Bill moved. Another tree splintered under a bullet. He felt Alice come up beside him, knew it was her from her pace and her firesmoke smell and the gentle hand that covered his as she guided the gun down between them and stepped close, pressing her lips to his. He nearly dropped the gun in surprise, but she had curled her fingers around his wrist and he couldn’t bring himself to move in a way she didn’t want him to, maddeningly close and insistent as she was, so he swallowed his reason and kissed her back. 

‘I reckon that’s a good start,’ she said. She tugged the blindfold from his eyes and he blinked at her in the sudden daylight, half expecting to find himself in the middle of a dream. ‘Nothing practice can’t fix.’ 

Two perfect holes in the tree trunks, red paint oozing from the marks like blood from a heart. 

He saw Roy standing there a little way off, by the horses, half-turned away as if out of decency. Alice went over to him and touched his face. ‘Came to say there’s supper back at the house for you both. Think you’ve done enough for today.’

She kissed Roy in the same deliberate way she had kissed Bill, her eyes seeking him out over Roy’s shoulder as if to include him in the act. The sun was high above them, but he knew the heat under his collar only came from her. They rode back together. Alice self-satisfied and calm in the company of her two men, leading the way home. 

***

She knew she wanted them both. Bill who had seen her in that pale yellow dress, and protected her in the way her first short-lived husband had been unable and to do. And Roy, who knew horses as well as Truckee’s father had, who was soft-spoken and gentle and yet was also hard as gunmetal. They had both killed. She had killed too, before the rest of the ladies of La Belle had been touched by grief or death or been forced to take up arms to defend their town. 

There was no hiding from it.  They were made from the same unyielding thing. 

And now she was alone in the house for the first time in years. It had been Iyovi’s idea, bringing Truckee back to their people for a short time to show the boy the type of manhood no white man could teach him. He was old enough. They would be safe, and Truckee was nearing an age when he could decide what kind of man he wanted to be. There was always a choice. 

The same way it had been a choice to bring both men to her bed. Making it clear what she wanted as she took off her clothes and called them each to her. Bill moving slowly inside her, Roy mouthing a wet circle around her breast and rocking against her as she stroked his cock, the feeling more intense than she had imagined it yet not overwhelming in its strangeness. It felt right. Roy’s fingers trailed down her bare belly, as the tension within her became unbearable and she closed her eyes and let the feeling wash over her. 

Bill grunted as she sank her nails into his neck and clenched around him, knowing he was close — and then he was no longer in her, and the emptiness was sudden as he moved off her and spilled over the sheets with a hoarse gasp. 

It was his way of being considerate, she knew. She watched as he walked naked from the room, hearing the sound of the front door open and the telltale rattle of the bucket in the well as he cleaned himself off in the yard. Roy was unhurried. She finished him off and stroked his hair with her free hand until Bill returned and began picking his clothes from the floor. 

‘Sit a while,’ she said, and he sat on the bed and looked at her as he always looked at her: with longing. ‘I ain’t going to marry again. You ought to know that. I’ve had two husbands and I don’t intend to have a third, and that’s how it’s going to be.’

Bill was quiet a long while. She touched his back, half-expecting him to leave without another word, but all he said was, ‘I understand,’ when at last he finally spoke. They were not ones to waste speech. She thought they could each go days without talking if needed, that she would still have fallen for Roy if she had taken his voice from him at their first meeting, just as she would still want Bill if he one day fully lost his sight. 

It was good to sit in the quiet. She shut her eyes and listened as their breathing settled in line with hers. 

***

The days lengthened and turned bone-dry with heat. Bill felt unsure if it was the weather that had him distracted, or if it was their new arrangement. It worked. He was welcome at Alice’s house in the way he had always wished, except for the fact he had never imagined Roy Goode alongside him in Alice’s bed. It was all so damn confusing was the thing. Roy Goode, who he had taken in for lawful trial and hanging, who he now knew in the undignified and intimate way he knew his own body, and who had once moved alongside him in perfect step as they each doled out death to Frank Griffin’s gang. He had had his shadow under him and Roy beside him, and in the moment both things had felt the same. 

Best not to think on it. He clicked his tongue and urged his horse homeward, through the empty streets of the town. Not a curtain stirred. He could always say he was out on official business, if pressed, though no one seemed to care where he rode after dark. They had always thought his habits strange. 

‘You know, from the direction you come I’d be wont to think you’re inbound from Alice Fletcher’s house,’ said Maggie, looming out of the darkness from where she sat smoking on the steps of his house. ‘Tell me you ain’t that stupid.’ 

Bill dropped his gun back in his holster and slowly unsaddled his horse. 

‘Think you ought to know better than to surprise a fellow like that. What’re you doing up?’

‘You might’ve been a crack shot once, Bill, but that boy Roy Goode’ll have a hole aerating your skull ‘fore you can clear your holster.’

‘It ain’t like that.’

‘Then what’s it like.’

‘It’s —’ He faltered, tugged at his necktie in frustration. ‘I don’t know how to say it, Maggie. Barely know myself.’ 

‘Well that’s about clear as mud. Tell me to mind my own damn business, would you, if you don’t want to talk about it —’

Maggie hauled herself upright and pushed past him, but he darted a hand out and grabbed her by the arm. She shrugged him off. Always close to anger, his sister, just as he was. The words wouldn’t come but she must have seen the unmade look on his face; it gave her pause while he tried to phrase the question he wanted desperately to ask.

‘How did you know?’ he finally choked. ‘With Callie. I mean, that she — that you — how’d you know it was going to turn out like that?’

Maggie stood in the street a long while. 

‘Jesus, Bill.’ 

‘All I’m saying is Roy ain’t going to shoot at me.’ Bill could feel his face face flushed with embarrassed heat. Thank God it was too dark to see it, though he was sure she could hear it in his voice. ‘And Alice ain’t going to shoot him, not again. That’s how it is.’ 

‘Well, heaven help you is all I can say,’ Maggie said, clearly torn between exasperation and a deep desire to laugh aloud. ‘I always knew you had it bad, but Christ on a cactus this one takes the cake.’ 

‘What do I do, Maggie?’

‘Don’t fuck it up,’ was all she said, and then she was gone, sidling back to her home and her woman while he stood there feeling relieved and foolish all at once. 

***

Roy dreamed of the ocean. A yellow dress floating on the foam.

When he awoke he was not alone: Alice beside him, Bill half-snoring on the other end of the bed with his legs tangled between theirs, not enough room for them all but that hardly mattered. It felt hard-won. As if they were the only survivors of a hard and terrible storm that had yet to pass over. 

The previous night came back to him in one slow wave. Sitting before the fire, watching Bill perform an act he might have had reason to practice as a married man, and which he was now taking the opportunity to reacquaint himself with while Alice gripped his hair and hooked her skirts into her belt with one hand. Roy counted himself a practical man. It hadn’t seemed right letting Bill do all the work, so he had gotten down beside them both and carefully run a hand over Bill just as he would a high-strung horse until he reached where he was hard. Half-expecting him to bolt at the touch — but Bill just made a muffled noise of surprise into the fold of Alice’s thighs and bucked up into his hand, and Alice seemed to like that just fine judging by the way her fingers tightened and clenched in his hair. 

Roy kissed her whitened knuckles as he put himself to work. It was a chain reaction, he figured, like setting dynamite charges across a rail bridge or mine shaft. One thing leading to another. 

‘What made you do that?’ Alice had asked once they were done, looking down at him with such a naked fondness it made his face burn. 

‘If a man’s otherwise occupied, seems a matter of decency to help him out, ma’am. I ain’t one to do nothing where there’s something to be done.’

‘Couldn’t do otherwise if you tried, could you?’ Alice had said. ‘It’s in your name, after all. You think that was good, Bill?’

‘Jesus Christ,’ choked Bill, head resting against her knee. Reminding Roy again of a horse with a distrust of human touch, unwilling to believe it had allowed itself to be ridden in spite of its own self-reliant nature. It was a hard thing to give up. Roy hoped he hadn’t broken the careful balance that they had between them; if Bill left he would stay gone, and Roy would never forgive himself for it.

There was a moment, as they got awkwardly to their feet, where Roy noticed Alice’s slickness was still smeared across Bill’s nose and moustache in a wet sheen, and the urge to taste it settled hot in his belly despite himself. 

‘Bill, would you let Roy kiss you?’ asked Alice, calm as anything. ‘I figure he’s too polite to ask it himself.’

Bill’s voice was even, evaluating Roy as facing him down the barrel of a gun even while his face flushed at the question.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Would you kiss him if I told you ought to?’

‘…I reckon. Yes.’

It was strange in sensation at first to kiss anyone other than Alice, least of all a man. Roy could feel her dark eyes on them as they reached for each other, filled with a silent approval that drove all doubt from his mind and brought his own need to boiling point as he tasted her fresh on Bill’s mouth.

‘That’s it,’ Alice said. He shuddered as he felt her lips brush his neck, right above the scar she had given him. 

It had seemed foolish, after all that, for Bill not to stay the night. There would be plenty of time to return to La Belle in the morning. 

***

It only occurred to her now not to be lonely. She was blessed with a family, two men that slept and lived at her side instead of fading into memory along with the rest of the town’s menfolk, and a small garden that bloomed despite the harshness of the desert sun. Alice Fletcher was about as close to happy as she could get. 

The ocean would keep. 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments appreciated


End file.
